Masquerade - SYOC
by Sora Kalopsia
Summary: "Take off the mask." He breathed, making as if to pull it from her face himself. His fingers plied it gently from her face, and his dark eyes danced with mischief as she expected to reveal the beautiful princess beneath. Instead, the boy screamed and drew back in repulsion, for under the surface lurked a monster. Feel something... she wished... anything. (Male/ Female SYOC OPEN)
1. Icarus

Before the story of his greed was woven into the tapestry of the myths of old for all to see, he was something else. Something less grand than the paintings of him that now haunt humanity, he was not created of words and sketches strung together in an effort to create a moral for mankind.

Before he was a part of history, Icarus was a boy.

And it is not surprising that a boy disobeyed his father's orders to stay away from the sun, no matter how important these orders appear to later readers of his frightful fate. For, in that first and only flight, Icarus fell in love for the first time. Not a romantic love, of course, as that is not what one feels for a heavenly body. No, Icarus loved the sun much more deeply than one could ever love another person. He loved her beauty and her warmth and the freedom she represented, a feeling he had never experienced in the dark labyrinth of his life. The boy loved more deeply than he ever had as his wax wings caught the wind and he longed to be just a little bit closer, just a little bit warmer.

And if his wings hadn't burned, Icarus surely would have as he spiraled higher and higher into the clear blue sky, ignoring the trepidation in his father's voice as there was none in his own heart.

Icarus was a boy, just a boy, and he did not understand how much he had to lose in his error.

Higher and higher, he rose, and louder and louder his father called for him to come back, but it was of no use. In the top of the sky as his appendages softened and dripped into the dark blue ripples below, Icarus found his place among the planets and stars. Oh, how bright the sun looked from this vantage point, how beautiful, and Icarus was warm, warmer than he had ever been before. He had lost sight of his father, not that he bothered to search for the small figure when he had eyes only for the sun herself. The child was so close now, so close to what Icarus imagined was paradise. And as he reached out for something that he could never grab, Icarus made a mistake. He was just a boy, and he longed to touch the sun so badly, that he forgot.

The sun was never his to have.

And Icarus was falling… falling… falling.

 _But wasn't falling just another way to fly?_

As Icarus's eyes alight on the beautiful sun he adored so greatly, he was unafraid. The wind carried away his father's screams and all the child heard as he so famously sank back to earth was the crashing of the waves. His gaze never wavered, not once, as he plunged into the water, from the celestial bodies above him, and some say that he smiled just slightly as he met his tragic demise.

As he sank beneath the surface of the cold ocean, beneath the wax remains of what had once been his glory, Icarus was no longer a boy of flesh of blood. He was stardust and moon and he was somehow more than human as his lungs filled with water instead of the air which had caused him to fall so far from grace. Though his heart stopped beating, the boy was not simply gone from this world. He was immortalized forever in the tragedy of his great mistake.

The sun was never his to hold for she was free and wild and not the plaything of a small boy with dreams larger than himself. But somehow, in that freefall to earth, the fallen child became something much, much bigger than even the sun herself.

Icarus was legend.

* * *

For all her life, Essa had fancied herself to be an Icarus.

It did not matter that he was nothing more than a story, a fictional creation to inspire a lesson to children who thought of disobeying their parent's wishes. No, to Essa, Icarus was so much more than some scraps of pages copied down sloppily in a book she had taken from the palace archives. He was real to her, really truly real, and she was not interested in rereading the story of his fall from grace.

No, what most intrigued Essa was his flight. It was always his flight, the one subject that always hovered just out of reach. For as far as Icarus had fallen, he'd first have had to fly. No one who could recall the old myth seemed to remember that part of the story, the part about the sun warming his back and his wings fluttering and dancing to a rhythm no one but he seemed to hear. Of what the instruments were made of, as the story was never that specific as to how one would go about crafting a pair.

For all her life, Essa had longed to fly.

But flight, for her, was impossible. Flight was something for birds, who were free to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they pleased. Flight was for Icarus, the boy who had lost so much more than his life as he sunk beneath the waves. Flight was made of feathers and freedom, an escape to the skies that was not a luxury that someone like she had. Though she collected the former, it was hard to capture liberties in her hands, as difficult as growing wings itself.

Oh, how she envied the birds.

As she sat at her window, hands busied fiddling with her dark curls, her eyes alighted on the snow that blanketed the earth beneath it in icy frosting. Essa tutted softly, her expression molding itself into the usual scowl she wore when she was alone. Snow. Essa was sick of snow. She found there was nothing remotely pleasing about the substance, and could not for the life of her find what her cousins found so enjoyable about it. It was cold and wet and dirty, whether it was freshly fallen flakes or slush, and she hated it. In her ten years living in this secluded palace in the middle of nowhere, she had seen enough snow to last a lifetime.

Isolation can do things to a person that no one understands. Things which are unexplainable, that all reason and logic would surrender to. Essa had seen it in her cousin, first, and then herself and her siblings. She didn't understand the things she was able to do, or rather the things that happened to her. They only worked when she didn't try to control it, anyway.

That was why her cousin made her so mad. Theo, with his perfect smile and his perfect looks and his perfect personality… he already had so much. He didn't need the gift, not like she did. He didn't need what he had, yet he had it, and it was so horribly unfair that every time she thought about him, her heart threatened to freeze. Threatened simply to stop beating out of the sheer unfairness of her life, because it was just so horribly, tragically unfair.

Life was unfair to Icarus, too, but at least he had gotten to fly.

Outside her window, she noticed another tragedy taking place. Two birds, one as white as the freshly fallen snow and the other dark as night, seemed to be fighting. More exactly, Essa guessed, only the raven was fighting. The other bird, which looked like a dove from what little she understood about ornithology, was dying. It's snowy feathers were no match for the piercing claws of it's adversary and now it was falling… falling from the sky.

 _Like Icarus_ , the princess thought momentarily, but no. The boy that haunted her dreams would not have been a dove. Doves were for peace and those unwilling or unable to fight for what they believed in. No, she was much more like the raven, whose inky feathers gleamed with hatred and pride against the society that marked it a villain.

The dove was on the ground now, and Essa had to lean slightly to see its corpse. The victor flapped overhead, watching it once momentary before soaring higher and out of her sight. Indignantly, she noticed that the dove was not, in fact, dead, but simply wounded. Perhaps its wing was broken and it could no longer take to the skies after all. Momentarily, Essa felt pity for the thing, but that emotion flitted out of reach as they all did. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't… she couldn't feel.

That wasn't normal to not feel anything, and all her life she had been told she wasn't normal, and it was just so horribly, tragically unfair.

Feelings were simply emotions and emotions were simply an expression of your body and heart and were not all that important in the long wrong. She didn't understand why they mattered to everyone. Why did everyone care so much if she didn't feel, if she didn't know what it was like to feel? Of course, caring could be classified as an emotion. Essa didn't understand why anyone bothered about it. Just because not understanding feelings was a tendency of psychopaths didn't mean that she was going to go on a murderous rampage at any second.

But she would if they didn't stop trying to make her feel something that she never would.

The dove's blood turned the snow red, and Essa didn't like the color. It wasn't nice, she thought, of the dove to go and bleed on the snow. As much as she despised the cold flakes, it looked much better white than it did any color, and she could almost imagine it was as if the world was covered in frosting. The dove and its stupid, red blood was ruining her vision. She turned her back on its stupid cries for help and went back to braiding her hair.

After all, it wasn't she who had made it bleed.

The sound of her door opening caused the princess's scowl to deepen, as she was not in the mood for visitors. It grew even angrier when her sister waltzed in, unaware or not caring that her presence wasn't wanted. "I didn't say you could come in, Lyra." Essa glared daggers as the younger brunette made herself comfortable on the king sized bed, snuggling into the covers.

"You didn't say I couldn't, either." Lyra smirked, flicking her hand lazily at her sister. "Besides, there's a lot of Ava outside these doors and she won't expect me in here."

Not able to argue with that, Essa sat down on her bed and permitted her younger sister to braid her dark curls. "What's Miss Priss doing this time?"

"It's Ava, what do you think she's doing?" Even though Lyra was sitting behind her, Essa could tell that she was rolling her eyes.

The oldest princess guessed with an evil smirk playing on her face, but which never quite reached her eyes. "Knowing our darling sister, I'm going to guess that she was being a bitch?"

"That, or whatever the seven-year-old equivalent is. She was going off at me for flirting with the new guard earlier. Luckily she didn't come in a few minutes earlier, or the kid would have had a very different sort of lesson…"

It was Essa's turn to roll her eyes. At 16, Lyra was always trying to prove how mature she was. She claimed she did a lot more than what was legal at her age, but she wasn't entirely sure she doubted Lyra's stories. People went to great lengths to prove they could feel love.

She wondered what it felt like to be in love.

The door opened again and Avalon flounced through in all her glory. Her blue eyes gave a wide, doey look fit for a baby angel, but her sneer was something of a demon. "Hello, everyone. How are you today?"

Lyra huffed. "No one wants you here, Ava."

Blinking her eyes, the young girl placed a hand on her heart. "What?" Her blue sapphires filled with tears. "How could you say something like that? I'm just a wittle girl." She suddenly stopped her tears and broke into a devilish grin. "I'm telling Father!"

"No one likes a snitch, Ava." Lyra returned her focus to her older sister's hair. "Then again, no one likes you, so go ahead and tattle." Essa had to work hard to keep from giggling and their baby sister's face crumpled into a death glare.

"I'm telling Father that too!" She cried and ran from the room as fast her little legs could take her.

Both the older sisters exchanged a smirk. Their youngest sister had inherited nothing but awful qualities, and her biggest fault was the way she had both parents wrapped around her little finger. No one could stand her, especially them.

"Irony is lost on her, isn't it?" Lyra hopped of the bed, and leaned on the wooden door frame. "Oh, and by the way, Mom and Dad are talking out your birthday present downstairs. You're getting a bunch of hot guys?"

An eyebrow raised on the oldest girl's face.

"I believe the politically correct term is a Selection." Lyra strutted from the room in a perfect mimic of Ava. "And I'm telling Mother if you say you don't want it… so she can give it to me!" she laughed.

If Essa could feel, she would be horrified. Life was so tragically unfair sometimes. She wished she could spread her wings and fly away from this all. All she needed was a chance to fail in front of many eligible bachelors before they realized she was incapable of feeling love.

And now it felt like her blood turning the snowy ground red.

Essa was an Icarus, alright.

She had plummeted back to the ground, and all she had left of the sky was a story.

* * *

The world was blue and Theo had no way of changing it.

Not that this fact bothered him, so to speak. He was as fond as the color blue as most people were, and he quite thought it fit the Earth that humans inhabited, from the sky to the ocean depths. Of course, being a man of science, Theo was well aware of the fact that the color of the ocean was nothing more than a reflection of the sky above it. That endless space that people looked into and imagined was somehow romantic, which the prince had never quite understood. The sky was simply more air, until it wasn't anymore and it became space. Space you couldn't breathe in, an endless sea of blackness and nothing but the colors of stars as they exploded. Sometimes blue. Everything was always blue, from his vantage point.

Not what Theo considered to be entirely romantic, though he had never been in a relationship before, so perhaps that would change his thoughts. He had heard that people changed in relationships, though in the secluded life he lived, he had yet to see it. Not that he doubted it, of course. As a man of science, though, he was obligated to show some doubt towards things not proven by evidence in front of his eyes.

Not that relationships occupied the majority of his thoughts, of course.

As he walked, his boots sank just slightly into the freshly fallen snow, making crevices that looked a little bit like crescent moons if one had an active imagination. He would have asked Verra, who gripped his arm daintily as she walked along, but Theo wasn't in the mood for a confused look. Even though she didn't speak, the child had no problem getting her message across clearly. He locked away his thoughts in his heart like a million other things he wish he could unload on someone and thought no more of it.

His thoughts switched to the small creature walking besides him, now pulling on his arm in an attempt to get his attention. At 11, she was 10 years his junior, yet she was the only family member he had ever truly connected with. Both his parents had died before he'd ever met them, his father by suicide and his mother in labor. Verra didn't even know who her father was and her mother had simply vanished years ago. No one had seen her since. That was the same time the child had stopped speaking.

The prince followed Verra's gaze to a small, white figure on the ground and he saw a fallen dove lying amongst the red snow. He released his cousin's arm and walked towards it, curiosity and sadness building in his heart. Picking it up, he saw life in its eyes but tragedy in its fate. Surely the bird would die, as was Mother Nature's way, as everything around it surely would in its own time. Who was he to break the cycle of life? Just because he had such a gift didn't mean he should use it.

But then he caught Verra's hard stare and thought differently.

He ran his fingers over the bird and watched its blood fade as its wings healed in front of his eyes, and Theo knew he wasn't a man of science after all. He was a boy of power and magic and if he wanted the sky lilac, he thought that he might, just might, be able to change it.

But he would keep it blue, he thought. It was a fitting color.

* * *

Essa was back at her window, but she was hiding as well, out of view of her two cousins. She watched with a scowl as Theo picked up the bird and somehow brought it back from a merciless injury. Verra was next to him, smiling her soft, sweet, sickening smile and Essa again thought how unfair her life was. If anyone deserved to have a gift like Theo's, it was her. If she wasn't going to experience emotions, she should be at least able to do something wonderful.

She watched as Theo handed the bird gently to his young cousin, and how sweetly the girl let the dove perch on her hand until it was well enough to fly away. She watched as they both stupidly waved after a bird, a bird for God's sake, before leaving the window and the bloodied red snow in their wake and continued their walk around the grounds. She watched the dove fly, a little shakily as it tested out its newly injured wing but then suddenly as graceful as an angel as it took to the sky and soared out of reach of the princess, of the world.

Essa wanted to fly more than anything in the world, but if you had to be fixed to fly, she never would. Because she was broken, and no one, not even her perfect cousin with his perfect powers that no one could explain, could put her pieces back together. She was not like a wounded bird, that once repaired could take once more to the skies. No, she had never been able to fly, and no amount of fixing her would allow her to do so.

Humans were not meant to fly. Icarus had proved that in his fateful fall, the one remembered in history books and legends, the one that proved how fanciful a notion it would have been for a person to ever believe they could soar. Humans were meant for the ground, and they were made of feelings and emotions and they didn't have broken wings because they had never had them in the first place. And Essa, with no wings and no feelings and no… defining features of either species, wasn't sure anymore what she was. But when she pressed her hand lightly to the window and it shattered into a million shards of glass, she wasn't sure she wanted to know what she was, after all. She could take a guess, but she didn't want to hear that she was a monster.

She'd heard it enough when people didn't think she could hear them.

And the shards of glass that fell outside the snow stained the snow red, and it was somehow impossible to tell her blood from that of the doves.

* * *

 **Chapter Song: "Colours" by Halsey and "Icarus" by Bastille.**

 **Hello, all! Welcome to Of Flight and Feathers, the sequel to When I Fall. I'm sure many of you know that I never finished that novel and I apologize. But I tried writing that 3 years ago, when I was 13 years old, and boy was that a mistake. I hope my writing seems to have improved a lot since then. It WILL be an SYOC, both male and female, but I'm not going to open submissions until the next chapter because I'm so busy at the moment.**

 **Before anyone asks, I WILL finish this story. I have everything planned out, with flexible changes for your characters of course, and I am hoping to do a weekly or at least a biweekly update.**

 **There's a couple different things about this story, mainly being that it is slightly fantasy based, as there are powers. However, the ONLY people to have powers are Theo, Tessa, and a few other members of the family (I'm not saying yet).**

 **I'll be posting a lot of info next week about the royal family. Keep in mind that this is definitely able to be read as a stand alone novel to When I Fall, and I honestly don't suggest that you go back and read that trainwreck of a novel.**

 **Please review and tell me how you liked it! I'll be posting forms, rules, and other stuff for submitting next week at the next update. Thank you all for reading!**

 **-Sora**


	2. Coin Toss

I heard someone crying in the house last night, but I don't know anything about ghosts. Is my mother a ghost now?

Does everyone who dies become a ghost?

 _They're only a ghost if someone alive is still holding onto them._

It was not a difficult feat to find a ghost.

In her young life, Verra could remember knowing about as many dead spirits as she did living entities. Not that she had ever bothered to count the ghosts that wandered aimlessly up and down the halls of the ornate palace. That could have been seen in a rude light, and besides, they never stayed still for long enough to be counted. Most of the time, they just floated past without a word to the small child, content in the fact that they did not appear to recognize her nor she them.

If the girl was to guess, she'd wager that the majority of the spirits were kin or compatriots of the soldiers or palace staff, just from the way they behaved. People who she'd never met alive simply because they had never been present to begin with. Whoever was their connection to the world of the living was the inhabitant of the palace, not they themselves until after their passing. Those whom she attributed this history to avoided her, perhaps not out of rudeness but out of fear. Her family lineage, while not ideal as far as the royal line went, still commanded a good deal of respect from members of the lower class. They would not speak to her unless she spoke to them.

It was rather difficult to explain to these occupants that she didn't speak to anyone, whether their heart beat or not.

Not that she was particularly interested in conversing with these spirits, anyway. In fact, Verra had no burning desire to communicate with any dead souls, but her opinions on the matter seemed to be consistently overlooked.

Ghosts often wanted to converse with her.

"Thinking again, are we?" The lanky figure of a handsome young man lounged against the wall without quite touching it, in case he was to accidentally fall through. His eyes were hidden behind thinly rimmed glasses, which Verra couldn't understand why he possessed as a spirit. The corners in his mouth were turned up, but the expressed was closer to a smirk than a true smile. The child resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him and returned her gaze to the book in her lap.

"I'd say I'm getting the silent treatment, but with you I always do, don't I?" The apparition was directly next to her now, peering over her lap at the letters on the page. He perched, or rather floated, on the arm of the library's comfortable recliner. This sudden movement might have shocked her at one time, but she had grown used to the patterns of each ghost. "Flip the page," the spirit commanded. "I've finished this one."

She obediently flipped the page… backwards, and looked haughtily up at the ghost as he set his face in something that might have been a scowl, had he not have lost the drive halfway through contorting his face.

"Clever little miss, today, aren't you. I'll let it slide since this once, since you're my sister's kid, but don't expect special treatment after today." The apparition sighed dramatically, as Verra lost her restrain and rolled her eyes after all.

Most people assumed ghosts would kill you, or at the very least terrorize you into losing your sanity. The girl was not utterly convinced these spirits weren't doing the last item to her, but mostly she was stuck with everyday nuisances like the one who floated just above her. Truthfully, however, this particular spirit didn't ask all that much of her besides flipping a page or two in a book when he was bored, something she felt she owed him in their relationship that could not quite be described as friendship.

She returned to the correct page as the spirit drifted away, his expression clouded in thought. A few minutes of silence passed comfortably between them, or as comfortable as minutes spent between a small child and the ghost of her very young, dead uncle could be. Verra was grateful for the silence; she was better able to enjoy the novel when it was quiet. And, as she knew from countless experiences from this current apparition, time when Alexander was not speaking was rather hard to come by.

"Do you ever think about ghosts?" Her uncle asked, his train of thought suddenly wanting opinions on some theory he wanted her opinion on. She never gave it, of course, though even if she did she doubted that he would have taken it into consideration. Verra herself was not old enough to curse, but she would hazard a guess that her cousins had several choice words in their vocabulary that seemed applicable to her uncle.

A patronizing look from a child was enough to make Alex question his momentum.

"Okay, well, that might have been the best way to phase it. But, do you ever wonder why you're the only one who can see us? Because I wonder that, like out of all the offspring my siblings and I have, why am I stuck with you? No offense, of course, it's just like… if you're some kind of magical deity or commune with the dead, I wonder why it's you out of all people."

"Alex, are you terrorizing our niece again?" A new voice, a distinctively female one, scolded. There was a wisp of smoke and a spirit with curly hair and her hands on her hips. "For the love of God, she's eleven. She doesn't need to be having an existential crisis."

Verra could have sworn that Alex's figure got more transparent, as if he was debating fading into air rather than facing his wife at the current moment. He spluttered slightly and put his hands in front of his body in a defensive position. "I, er, um… I was not… I mean, I was just wondering if maybe… She might know something about it that she's not telling us."

The two girls exchanged an exasperated look at his poor choice in words. Ciara, who was far more likable in the child's opinion, took a moment to collect herself before answering. "I'm sure there's a great deal she's not telling us, but maybe that's due to the fact that you're an asshole ghost that bothers her and demands she turn pages of the books all the time. I wouldn't tell you anything either." The couple exchanged several other choice emotions silently in a battle that could only be summed up as Ciara won. "Alexander, let's go. You've bothered Vivierra enough for one day."

"But…" The dead Prince whined like a kicked puppy. "I… I didn't finish this chapter."

Ciara gave him a hard stare. The next instant, her husband was gone. "Ah, the perks of being utterly destroyed by him when we were alive. I own his ass in the afterlife." She seemed extraordinarily smug about a somewhat dismal fact. "I'll try and keep him away this afternoon. Oh, and your cousins were headed to breakfast last time I checked. You might want to head downstairs as well." With that last warning, she was gone, more than likely to find wherever her husband had skulked off too.

Verra ignored the last statement her ghostly aunt had made, and not for the first time, she wondered why she got along altogether better with spirits of relatives she'd never met than the ones she'd lived with all her life. Why her living family pretended that she did not exist. Why she had to work hard to convince herself truly did.

Sometimes, she thought, it wasn't so much that only she could see the ghosts; it was only they who could see her.

* * *

Just as a coin is simultaneously two things, heads and tails, so are you, my dear.

You are like a coin.

 _You will never be completely loved no matter which side people see._

Lyra had no memory of why she stopped wearing gold.

She had tried to remember, of course, although admittedly not for extremely long. On principle, the princess never attempted much. She had servants and maids and other people to try for her. She had never been asked to do anything for herself. Perks of being royalty, she supposed. Perks of being the second-born, it was Essa's duty to train for the crown.

That might have been why she begun to rebel in the first place, but it probably wasn't as poetic as that, really.

She wouldn't know. She didn't remember that, either.

 _It's late, on a Saturday, and she's stumbling into a part of the palace that she wasn't entirely supposed to be in. She's probably 12, maybe 13, and she's just starting to see the unfairness of having to always be behind some stupid mask just because her father is afraid of his past. Lyra is running her hands along the ribbon that holds her mask on, fingers smoothing the satiny ribbon. If she ripped it off, just for once, surely no one would know. There's no one there, after all._

Lyra supposed there was quite a lot of her life that she cannot will not recall.

 _She doesn't see him when he comes up from behind her. The child is busy staring at her reflection in a mirror, pinching her face to bring color in her cheeks. The mask should have been on the ground, where she discarded it. Instead, he is playing with its golden ribbon, winding it around his fingers as a thin smile creeps onto his face._

She wished she recalled less about family breakfasts. They were a pitiful attempt on her father's part, really, and everyone knew it. There were more cracks in all of their personal relationships that maple syrup can fix, even when poured onto mountains of fluffy pancakes. Her male cousins appeared not to care, however, as both Kallon and Theo had a stack of at least four on their plates. There was a book open next to the latter, and he was careful to avoid spilling on the pages. The previous one showed that he was not always successful. Across from them, Kairys had her phone in hand, the confetti of the case sending sparkling lights dancing across the dining room. As Lyra sat down, the blonde looked up briefly and gives her a slight smile. Her green eyes were illuminated more brightly by the ornate golden markings of the mask she wears.

It nearly matches the princess' own facial covering, though she has avoided the color gold since…

 _"Well, well. What do we have here?" His voice will haunt her nightmares for years to come._

Kairys had the camera app pulled up, pointed at the empty chair seated immediately across from herself and Lyra. This, the princess knew, is rarely a good sign.

"She's not here yet, I take it?" The brunette whispered to Kairys, ignoring the platter of pancakes and helping herself to the glass of orange juice that had just been poured for her.

Her cousin chuckled, switching away from the camera to check her Instagram feed. "Trust me, I think we're going to know when she's planning to arrive. I hope there's as much screaming as we predicted there's going to be, though. It'll bum out my followers if all she does is throw a little temper tantrum. I've been building this up all morning."

"What followers?" Her twin, who's sitting on the other side of Lyra, teased and promptly received a fork thrown at his head. Dodging, Kallon stuck his tongue out at her. "That was weak! Get your head in the game, Rys."

He would have gotten a slap in the face when their mother, seated at the opposite end of the table to the right of the King, glared at them. With her blonde hair, so like her daughter's, pulled up into an elegant bun, she looked even more frightening than usual. She only had to clear her throat once before both twins bitterly slid down in their seats. Their father, across from his wife, started to laugh, but one look from his wife turned it into a cough.

Theo absentmindedly turned another page of his book, oblivious to anything happening around him.

Then came the screaming.

"Oooh, boy, that was a good one." Kairys mumbled under her breath as a particularly creative string of profanity caught everyone's attention. It was vulgar enough to even make Theo look up from his book, probably to check whether or not he should escort Verra away before the culprit actually entered the scene. Thankfully, neither of the two younger royals had come down to breakfast yet because everyone at the table was sure this was going to get much, much worse.

Essa looked and sounded a lot like how Lyra imagined a hurricane appeared. Anger emanated from her so strongly that she was honestly unsure how her parents were not running away in fear. If Lyra didn't know that most of her older sister's temper tantrum was staged, she would likely have bolted as soon as the first profanity was uttered.

"What the-" Essa started, before Queen Raleigh, who was far calmer than her husband looked to be interrupted with, "Language, dear."

"But…" Kairys whined, phone in one hand, the other trying desperately to stop her giggles, "If she doesn't curse, I doubt it will get as many likes! We all know- OUCH!" Her outburst was stopped when her brother kicked her shin under the table. Their mother, Princess Callisa, shot them both the evil eye. The twins, at almost twenty, knew enough to retreat.

"What the… flip … is this I hear about a Selection?" If looks could kill, Essa would have been crowned Queen at that very moment as the brunette placed both hands on her hips.

The King and Queen's eyes flipped towards each other just briefly in a silent conversation that looked to Lyra to contain a _you tell her_ **NO** sort of dialogue.

King Perseus lost.

"Now, darling, be reasonable about this. The people are getting restless… they've never wanted me on the throne, and both you and Theodore are at a fit age where you need to be considering your futures…"

Both Lyra and her mother winced. Mentioning the fact that Theo's Selection would be taking place at the same time… probably not the greatest idea that the King had ever had, not that he was particularly known as a man with all that many.

Essa's face turned a darker shade of red. "What do you mean ' **THEO** and I?' What does he even have to do with this?! He's not even in line for the throne!" She pointed a finger aggressively at her older cousin, who looked very much like he wanted to hide behind his enormous stack of pancakes. "He… he doesn't even matter!"

 _"You don't matter."_

The memories flooded back to her at that line and suddenly…

 _"What?" Lyra asks, stomping her small foot impatiently. At first she was afraid, afraid because he had caught her without the mask on and Daddy is going to be angry, but now she's simply angry. How dare he refuse to return the item? Doesn't he know who she is? "Give me back my mask! I want it, now!"_

No, she doesn't remember.

 _The child jumps for the mask, but he holds it out of her reach. He is probably a guard, though he's not currently in his uniform. Off-duty, perhaps. She doesn't care, he is unimportant. And she will have him fired for this offense. He dangles it just out of her reach. "Is that all you've got, Princess? Should have expected it. All you Royal brats are just the same. You hide behind these things because you're too afraid of your own people seeing your face. If they saw them, they'd realize._

She does not remember.

 _"They'd realize that you don't matter."_

Doesn't... please **don't** remember.

 _He has dropped the mask. His arms are on her before she can react. She doesn't understand what he wants with him, but he is holding her so tightly that she can barely breathe. There's a blood-curdling shriek. Lyra thinks it's her voice, but she's never been sure. His hand is pressed over her mouth and he's yelling now, yelling at her to shut her mouth and stay quiet. She squirms and bites his hand, and he throws her to the ground. His eyes are violent as he towers over her, the mask lies discarded on the floor next to his feet._

Please… and she doesn't know which timeline she lives in. Who she is crying out to.

 _He's too strong, and she's weak. She is still screaming._

"Lyra… Lyra, can you hear me?" Someone yelled at her, but their words are muffled, as if she is hearing them from a great distance. Her eyes were focused on the man who is pinning her down, as she kicks and screams bloody murder. She doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, she wants him to leave her alone.

She is

 **falling.**

 _Suddenly, there is a weight lifted off her chest. Someone else's voice, a more familiar voice, is deadly calm. "Get off of her," it commands, eerily expressionless. It's enough to get the man to stand up, his leg still pinning her to the ground. Lyra, though she has her eyes pressed tightly together in fear, recognizes her older sister's voice._

"Someone get the doctor!"

" _Oh, ho. The little Princess is going to take me down? Where's your guard, little girl?" He says with a laugh. "What are you going to do?"_

She failed back and forth, unaware of who she was hitting. Her body hit the ground, hard. "Lyra, Lyra, please! Please, calm down."

 _There is no emotion in Essa's voice when she replies. It scares Lyra more than the man. The child has never heard anything so dark. "I'm going to kill you."_

Accusations were thrown all around her. "This is your fault, Tessatura!" It was her father's voice, the one yelling. "If you hadn't screamed- you know she's sensitive!"

 _There is a sound unlike any the young princess has ever heard. A loud crack, like lightning striking inside. Then a thudding. His leg is no longer pressing her to the ground._

"It's not my fault!" Essa yelled back.

 _She opens her eyes. The man is only a few inches from her own. His expression shows the fear. His lifeless eyes show that he is dead. Lyra looks at her sister, whose hands are glowing with a black light. There is terror etched in her sister's face._

 _"It's not my fault." Essa is still calm, even in a state of panic. Even as a dead body lies at her feet. The light around her hands is starting to fade. "He was a bad person. Bad people deserve to die."_

Lyra was a bad person too. If she hadn't gone down there, that man would never have found her. She would never have needed to be saved. He would never have been killed died.

 _They cannot wash all the blood off her mask. It has stained the sparkling jewels a deep ruby color._

She never wears gold anymore.

* * *

 **Alternate Title: My First Chapter Back in 6 Months and It's Existential Ghosts and the Essa Ruins Breakfast Speech in Both Present AND Past Tense Because Lyra's Flashbacks are Wild - And Neither POV is from a Main Character.**

 **It's also not edited super well because I honestly just want to go to bed.** **If it's not evident, the italics are around flashback points for Lyra, which is also why the tone tends to switch to the present tense. It's not well done, though, so that's also why it doesn't work out well XD**

 **Hello, everyone! I know, I know, it's been an incredibly long time since the last update, and I really am sorry for that. I… um… well, I had a pretty major accident happen in my life and my health was pretty poor for a long time after that. It was really difficult to balance anything with that happening, and well… I don't really like talking about it, but I'm doing a whole lot better now.**

 **Happier things that are new with me: I passed all 4 of my AP tests with 4s (except the one I got a three on but it was AP bio and I'm not even surprised). I got my driver's license in the mail today and the picture doesn't look too terrible, although my hair is slightly darker red than normal… and that's about it haha!**

 **I'm going to be updating a lot more regularly than every six months now, I promise. It might not be on a daily or weekly basis, I have college applications due and AP classes to take, but I shouldn't have such a long break between chapters. I just want to take a moment and thank everyone for reading this after such a long time. It wasn't fair to make so many people wait, and I really am sorry. I know I owe so many people apologies for making them wait on forms or reviews or anything. I'm trying to catch up, I promise, I really, really am.**

 **I know that a lot of you are going to be frustrated with the gap, and with this chapter because it's not all that good (not that the last one was any better, particularly) and I really do get it. But, please don't flame at me in the reviews. I'm always open to criticism, I promise, but this is the first thing I've published (not written, I took a ton of time to attempt to get skills back) since I suffered a pretty major head injury, so I'm already a little nervous about how it turned out; I rewrote this fully about 7 times because I didn't like anyway it turned out.**

 **Now, onto the bigger issue at hand: The Selection!**

 **If you can't already tell, this is sort of an interesting universe. More will be explained about why the Royal family doesn't show their face to the public and about why Essa and her cousins seem to have these strange powers, but also a lot of it probably won't be because I'm honestly not great at what I'm doing #whoops.**

 **I'm going to say this, and I might be afraid of saying this, but… the Royal family are not the only ones who are going to be allowed to have powers. HOWEVER, I wouldn't really describe this as a completely supernatural Selection. I'm taking 2 people from each gender, at the very MOST, and you'll end up seeing why. You do NOT have to give your character powers, and even if you do, I won't necessarily be using them.**

 **Sorry, this is totally confusing and I'm happy to answer questions if necessary. Basically, my main point is, don't completely base your character around a specific set of powers. I'm looking for ones that work with the storyline, so even if I totally love your character, their powers may not work. If you keep he or she's powers mostly separate from her main qualities, I may just ask if I can accept them without the powers. And again, you don't necessarily have to give your character any powers at all.**

 **In a non-spoilery attempt to explain my crazy ideas, powers don't show up at birth. They appear later on in life do to… something. It's up to you to come up with whatever you want, go crazy, but just know that most people's powers are very small (like, being able to change eye color at will or that kid in Sky High who can glow) and very unheard of. Your character would most likely not have revealed their powers to anyone else, or I'll take characters who don't know that they have them in the first place. (Side-note, anyone who sends me a kid who glows like Zack or has some utterly useless power is my hero).**

 **Otherwise, I'm going to be posting the rules/form on my profile because I don't want to take up any more space there. Please head there if you're interested (and pretty please also be interested) after maybe dropping off a review? But honestly, as I'm like actually the worst reviewer ever now, I totally understand if you don't.**

 **Thank you all so much for sticking with me! Feel free to PM me for questions about the Selection and forms and characters or the importance of Dear Evan Hansen: The Musical (that last one was slightly off topic whoops) and have an amazing night/day! I really, really love all of you and thanks so much to a bunch of people who encouraged me to write this when I was really afraid of posting again.**

 **PS: If the form isn't up on my profile immediately after you read this, I'm probably editing it and posting it then, and/or I fell asleep. It's very late haha!**

 **-Paige**


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